Speaker Spotlight
He Asks a Room Full of Adults to Build a Cape. HR Leaders Are the Ones Who Keep Bringing It Up Afterward.
Matthew M. Anderson — Author of Being Super Human and Running Mate · Creator of the Craft Your Cape Framework · TEDx Speaker · Bismarck, North Dakota
Most sessions on strengths end with a personality result and a page of adjectives, and the adjectives are gone by Friday.
Matt Anderson has people build something instead. The Craft Your Cape exercise produces a visual artifact that captures what a person actually brings to a team, which turns out to be a much easier way to say your own strengths out loud than being asked to list them.
The by-product is the real point. Once everyone has a cape, the team has a shared language for what each person contributes, and noticing each other stops being a soft aspiration and becomes something concrete.
The Exercise Other Professionals Single Out
The best evidence for a session is when somebody describes the mechanism rather than the mood.
A senior corporate relations manager at Special Olympics Minnesota called Craft Your Cape a standout, creative framework that would spark meaningful conversation in any workplace. That is a specific claim about a specific tool, from someone whose job is judging partnerships.
The premise underneath is about the inner critic, and it is drawn from his book Being Super Human. The session removes the stigma around naming your strengths out loud while also making it acceptable to admit limitations honestly, which is the pairing that makes it work. Neither half lands on its own.
The Session That Comes With a Measurement
Kindness Factor is the one to look at if the organization wants something more durable than a good afternoon.
It works through six relational values behind effective collaboration, and it covers the unglamorous parts most culture sessions skip: healthy boundaries and actual conflict-management systems rather than good intentions. What sets it apart is the survey tool that measures those six areas.
That gives a manager a baseline and a target. Culture work usually resists measurement, so a session that arrives with an instrument attached is a different proposition for an HR buyer who has to justify the spend and show movement later.
An Unusually Strong Public Sector and Community Banking Track Record
His client list is worth reading closely, because it is concentrated in places that are hard to break into and slow to rebook without good reason.
The Bank of North Dakota, North Dakota Health and Human Services, North Dakota Parks and Recreation, North Dakota Retirements and Investments, Bismarck State College, Capitol Credit Union, the Independent Community Banks of North Dakota, Legacy Financial Partners and Special Olympics Minnesota.
For a credit union league, a community banking association, a state agency or a public sector conference, that is a speaker who already knows the room. The HR director at the Bank of North Dakota noted that he helped make their staff event cohesive in message and meaning, and described his approach as humble, which is a useful signal for an audience that tends to resist a hard motivational register.
A vice president at HID Global described the same balance from the corporate side: inspiration and practicality together rather than one at the expense of the other.
Four Ways to Program Him
Craft Your Cape is the signature, best for team days, staff retreats and any group that needs to see each other differently.
The Shocking Superpower of Relationships makes the case that belonging is the least expensive and most neglected resource an organization has, and connects it to retention and discretionary effort.
360 Degrees of Servant Leadership is for organizations trying to spread culture change through the whole chart rather than from the top, and it teaches people to serve up, down and across from wherever they sit.
Kindness Factor is the measured culture session described above, and the right pick when a manager wants to track progress.
Full descriptions are on his speaker profile.
Book Matthew M. Anderson
Available for keynotes and workshops on staff culture, servant leadership, belonging, accountability and team mindset, for corporate, public sector, banking and nonprofit audiences.